Message-ID: <429E8CA7.7080805@dmv.com>
Date: Thu, 02 Jun 2005 00:35:51 -0400
From: Sven Willenberger <sven@dmv.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (X11/20041206)
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To: Stacy White <harsh@computer.org>
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Adaptec/LSI/?? RAID
References: <002601c56725$2bdd2010$0200a8c0@grownups>
In-Reply-To: <002601c56725$2bdd2010$0200a8c0@grownups>
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Stacy White presumably uttered the following on 06/01/05 23:42:
> We're in the process of buying another Opteron server to run Postgres, and
> based on the suggestions in this list I've asked our IT director to get an
> LSI MegaRaid controller rather than one of the Adaptecs.
> 
> But when we tried to place our order, our vendor (Penguin Computing) advised
> us:
> 
> "we find LSI does not work well with 4GB of RAM. Our engineering find that
> LSI card could cause system crashes. One of our customer ... has found that
> Adaptec cards works well on PostGres SQL -- they're using it as a preforce
> server with xfs and post-gress."
> 
> Any comments?  Suggestions for other RAID controllers?
> 
> 
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------

We use the LSI MegaRaid 320-2x with the battery-backed cache on a dual 
opteron system that uses 8G of RAM. OS is FreeBSD amd64 (5.4) and runs 
without hesitation. Database currently over 100GB and it performs 
admirably. So chalk one anecdotal item towards the LSI column. To be 
fair I have not tried an Adaptec card with this setup so I cannot 
comment positively or negatively on that card. As a side note, we did 
have issues with this setup with Linux (2.6 kernel - 64bit) and XFS file 
system (we generally use FreeBSD but I wanted to try other 64bit OSes 
before committing). Whether the linux issues were due to the LSI, 
memory, Tyan mobo, or something else was never determined -- FreeBSD ran 
it and did so without flinching so our choice was easy.

HTH

Sven